Susan Wolf Ditkoff, partner and co-head of the philanthropy practice at the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit adviser for organizations and philanthropists, said: “If the benefactor doesn’t make their wishes known, the default is that the foundation will exist in perpetuity.”

Ditkoff doesn’t mention that foundations like to “exist in perpetuity” because they offer an income stream to their officers; even if they don’t offer an income stream, they offer lots of paid dinners and the pleasures of having nonprofits grovel, beg, and praise.

* The Department of Education’s “Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII)” is an oxymoron along the lines of military music or humane war.

* “The North Dakota Stripper Boom,” which is another tale about unexpected expected consequences: “North Dakota [. . .] is experiencing an oil boom, which is leading to an overwhelmingly male population boom, which has some strange spillover consequences.”

If you have bigger lungs than your competitor, all things being equal, force them to compete in a contest where oxygen is the crucial limiter. If your opponent can’t swim, you make them compete in water. If they dislike the cold, set the contest in the winter, on a tundra. You can romanticize all of this by quoting Sun Tzu, but it’s just common sense.